An adaptive handover boundaries algorithm

Cellular network design is based on worst case traffic scenarios that a certain cell might experience. However, reality has shown that traffic tends to vary quite a lot both on a short-term and long-term basis. Although the long-term changes of the traffic can be accommodated by adding capacity where required, the short-term changes are very difficult to accommodate, as these need almost real-time adaptability of the system. This paper describes an adaptive approach to the short-term congestion problem. The proposed algorithm makes substantial utilisation of the coverage areas among the cells by dynamically changing the handover margins of neighbouring cells. In this way, equalisation of the traffic load is achieved among several adjacent cells and the system performance is substantially enhanced.